In the past, photopolymer printing plates have been produced by semi-automatic and automatic platemaking apparatus, such as those shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,837,887 and 3,848,998, respectively. Both of these patents teach a step by step process creating inherent "lost" time periods which increase the total cycle time required to produce a plate. U.S. Pat. No. 3,837,887 discloses apparatus and process for producing a photopolymer printing plate by several independent time consuming steps, such as: placing a cover film over a photo transparency; moving a carriage over said photo transparency in one direction thereby creating "lost" time; reversing the carriage and doctoring a photopolymer onto the surface thereof while pressing a backing sheet into the surface of said photopolymer; sequentially exposing the back and then the front of the photopolymer sandwich, etc.. U.S. Pat. No. 3,848,998 discloses basically the same apparatus and further includes a developer unit connected to the exposure unit. It can be seen that both of these approaches create "lost" time, which hampers the efficiency of the apparatus and increases the cost of printing. The instant invention provides a novel automatic platemaking process and apparatus which performs several platemaking procedures in a minimum number of combined steps and in a particularly novel sequence, to virtually eliminate "lost" time.